And Other Poems Blue Voyage

Description

The Blue Voyage, and other poems is a new collection by Anne French. The first in eleven years, it is confident in execution, elegiac in tone. A more comic initial section leads into a section of thoughtful but vivid sailing poems and then a number of elegies, laments and funeral songs from French's 'black notebook'. The final section voyages to Korea and includes some loose translations of poems by modernist Korean writer Han Yong-un. In their considerations of remembrance and writerly acts, these 'translations' aptly pick up themes introduced in the book's first three parts and round off the book nicely: 'Waiting / for the ringing of the bells announcing daybreak, / I put down my brush.'

Author description

Poet, publisher, singer, sailor and gardener Anne French is the author of a number of poetry collections with AUP including Boys' Night Out, a finalist in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and All Cretans Are Liars, winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and the PEN Award for First Book of Poetry in 1988. French had an extensive career in publishing, with Oxford University Press and Te Papa Press, and currently works at the University of Auckland.